The knee jerk reaction, assuming any questioning of the lockdown demonstrates a cavalier, uncaring disregard is puerile. Grown adults shouldn’t simply believe everything they are told like mindless idiots. Critical thinking and asking questions is never “bad” under any circumstances whatsoever.
Corruption is embedded in health systems. Throughout my life—as a researcher, public health worker, and a Minister of Health—I have been able to see entrenched dishonesty and fraud. But despite being one of the most important barriers to implementing universal health coverage around the world, corruption is rarely openly discussed. In this Lecture, I outline the magnitude of the problem of corruption, how it started, and what is happening now. I also outline people’s fears around the topic, what is needed to address corruption, and the responsibilities of the academic and research communities in all countries, irrespective of their level of economic development. Policy makers, researchers, and funders need to think about corruption as an important area of research in the same way we think about diseases. If we are really aiming to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure healthy lives for all, corruption in global health must no longer be an open secret.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32527-9/fulltext
There were an estimated 43,900 excess deaths in England and Wales last winter, the highest number since 1999, figures show.
The report suggests most of the deaths involved people over 75.
The flu virus was a major cause of the rise, along with an influenza vaccine that was less effective than those of previous years, experts said.
The figures are published by the Office for National Statistics and show there were more deaths in women than men.
https://www.statista.com/chart/21240/enforced-covid-19-lockdowns-by-people-affected-per-country/
You will find more infographics at Statista
Colleagues around the country report their clinics have never felt emptier or their workloads lighter as hospitals have gone on a war footing.
Yes, of course it is a war we have to fight with every weapon at our disposal. But I read, with a growing sense of outrage, a leaked report this week claiming that over the Easter weekend just 19 patients were treated at the newly-created 4,000-bed Nightingale Hospital in East London.
“The supine capitulation to a de facto police state in a country long regarded as a cradle of liberty has been one of the most depressing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. In a matter of days, busybodies are ratting out neighbours for going for a run twice; these people would be pigs in muck in the GDR. The police taping over of isolated park benches and harassment of sunbathers or sea swimmers without a soul within 100 feet have no basis in epidemiology. “
Speaking may be a primary mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Considering that reports of asymptomatic transmission account for 50-80% of COVID-19 cases and that saliva has peak viral loads at time of patient presentation, droplet emission while speaking could be a significant factor driving transmission and warrants further study. We used a planar beam of laser light passing through a dust-free enclosure to detect saliva droplets emitted while speaking. We found that saying the words ‘Stay Healthy’ generates thousands of droplets that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. A damp homemade cloth face mask dramatically reduced droplet excretion, with none of the spoken words causing a droplet rise above the background. Our preliminary findings have important implications for pandemic mitigation efforts.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.02.20051177v1
“Barely a day goes by without a politician saying that they will be ‘led by the science’. But what we are seeing with Covid-19 is not ‘science’ in action.”
New cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine have been reported in four African countries and more children are now being paralysed by vaccine-derived viruses than those infected by viruses in the wild, according to global health numbers.
About 80% of patients have mild to moderate disease (including non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases), 13.8% have severe disease and 6.1% are critical (respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure). Individuals at highest risk for severe disease and death are people aged over 60 years of age and those with underlying conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and cancer. Disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild. About 2.4% of the total reported cases were individuals under 19 years of age. A very small proportion of those aged under 19 years have developed severe (2.5%) or critical disease (0.2%).
The term “cytokine storm” calls up vivid images of an immune system gone awry and an inflammatory response flaring out of control (Fig. 1). The term has captured the attention of the public and the scientific community alike and is increasingly being used in both the popular media and the scientific literature. However, while the general concept of an excessive or uncontrolled release of proinflammatory cytokines is well known, an actual definition of what constitutes a cytokine storm is lacking. Furthermore, there is not a good understanding of the molecular events that precipitate a cytokine storm, of the contribution such a “storm” makes to pathogenesis, or of what therapeutic strategies might be used to prevent the storm or quell it once it has started.
So peer review is a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative, and scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.
[Nicola Oliver ] tells us that 15,969 people died of flu (in England) last year, although only 320 died in hospital, and 15,649 were apparently left to die without due medical attention at home. What she fails to note is that the 15,969 deaths were not recorded deaths but a projection derived from the Flumomo algorithm [2] for ‘flu attributable deaths’ based on all cause mortality [3], so it does not really get us anywhere (except that it is just kind of thing I am complaining about!)